Having Children at 40: Exhaustion, Health and a Lottery

Having Children at 40: The Toll He Describes Without Sugarcoating

A father who had children after forty describes it without sugarcoating: 'It will cost me my life, because it has already cost me my health.' The phrase condenses what he himself describes as a vicious circle: being overwhelmed turns anyone into a worse father, and being a worse father aggravates the exhaustion until the equation has no way out.

That testimony is not a rarity. Throughout the thread the same pattern repeats: work that never ends, rest that never comes, vacations described as punishment, and the feeling that children absorb for years without giving anything back. Another father, with a ten-month-old baby and a second pregnancy on the way, sums it up the same way: a year without sleep, reproaches upon arriving home, and dirty diapers. The question left open is as simple as it is uncomfortable: is it really worth it?

The Toll Described Without Heroics

Those who live it describe it as daily misery, without heroics. Giving the entire day to creatures that give nothing back until years later. Health, they say, is the first thing you pay. The most obvious response—there must be something good about children, and if not, the problem is with the one raising them—runs into a nuance that changes the entire diagnosis: in at least one of the cases described, the other part of the couple does not function as support and the father becomes the only stable base in the home. That shifts the problem to the support network.

Is It Better to Have Children Young or Wait Until 40?

The data point that repeats most often is age. Having them at twenty or thirty leaves margin; after forty, they maintain, the body can't take the same and the wear accumulates. One of the scenarios raised lowers the threshold of discouragement even further: reaching sixty with a twenty-year-old daughter. The repeated recommendation is to have them early and not stretch adolescence into the forties.

The criticism of delaying fatherhood for travel or projects appears explicitly: some argue that this can be done equally at forty and that stretching adolescence to that age is a mistake. It is also defended that having them young leaves you half free at forty, with ten years ahead for hobbies and travel.

How Much Does Education Weigh in How a Child Turns Out?

Here the agreement is striking. Parents with years of experience maintain that education explains less than half of the final outcome. A calculation circulating in the conversation puts it around 20%: same home, same upbringing, two children and two opposite outcomes. The proverb is cited as a sentence: 'What nature doesn't give, Salamanca doesn't lend.' A child, they conclude, is a lottery, and bad company weighs more than any manual of being a good father.

Not everyone accepts that fatalism. Some respond that the norm is internalized before age two and that afterwards children simply replicate what they see at home. The counterexample thrown out is uncomfortable: an entire generation raised under the same traditional principles and with the same religion, and yet the parks of the eighties were full of syringes. The environment plays its own game.

The Parenting Model That Died Out

Nostalgia has numbers. Families of twelve siblings on one side and nine on the other are compared, where the older ones took care of the younger ones and parents didn't have to entertain anyone. The neighborhood, neighbors, and teachers corrected, and the street educated for free. Today that framework doesn't exist and children's entertainment is described as something aberrant.

Some take the argument much further, toward a narrative about the transformation of work and family over the last fifty years. It is the most ideological part of the exchange. The idea that remains is Donnie's: parenting was more bearable when it was collective; today, turned into a task for a single person or couple, it is described as exhausting.

The Couple as an Open Front

There are messages that attribute the problem to the distribution of tasks within the home and others that take it to a conflict between men and women. Against that framework, a pattern is also described: whoever is left with the burden of parenting alone—due to illness, disinterest, or breakup—accumulates more wear. The outcome that one story puts on the table is bitter: hold on until the physical need for two hands at home disappears, and then disappear. It is not a plan. It is exhaustion with an expiration date.

Do Children Serve as Old-Age Insurance?

A recent testimony dismantles the idea of the child as guaranteed emotional pension. A man recounts the death of his mother: she never lacked a son by her side, neither during the agony nor in the final moment. Her roommate, on the other hand, spent hours alone, calling nurses who barely came. The conclusion is not that children ensure company, but that bonds are built and sustained by facing problems together.

Others point out the opposite with the same coldness, and also with experience: there are elderly people with dementia better cared for in nursing homes than at home, both for the patient and for the caregiver. The family as a safety net is not an acquired right; it is a result that must be worked on for decades and may never arrive.

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None of this points to a single answer. What does appear in the thread is a distribution of testimonies: parents who say their children are the best thing that has peine to them and others who describe exhaustion, doubts, and distance.